That is not the question. Not even for a minute. Ride ‘em if you got ‘em, I say.

Pardon the temporary rough going on here, I’ll have the finished work up by the end of the week.

As for last week’s pining for a new Victory, it seems I’ll be waiting a bit longer; in the grand scheme of things, waiting another year is no big deal, and probably a good idea. It gives me time to fix the shovelhead and get it readier for sale, and also to really shop around and decide what I want. The choices at this point, based on taste and preference, include Victory Vision, Cross Country, and Hard Ball models, as well as Harley Electra Glide, Road Glide, Road King, and Switchback models. 

The photo I found on the HD website of the Switchback portrays this bagger sitting in front of the Stewarts Point General Store, the destination of one of my first ever out of town rides on a motorcycle. I was nineteen years old and had just scored a burgundy Yamaha 650 Special. I packed a lunch for the day and rode from my home in Santa Rosa, CA, up to Healdsburg, then past Lake Sonoma to the coast at Stewarts Point and the store featured in the Switchback marketing photo.

In the year before I’m able to get a new bike between my knees, I’ll be shifting some of my artistic energy to other works of art, with the intention of selling them and saving a bit more down payment for the bike. I’m starting a series of American flag-themed pieces that I’ll be making available here and on my Facebook page. The first shows Jones pulling off a slide on his (my?) shovelhead, sending a hapless turtle flying into the air.  Keep your eyes on the Facebook page as these come out.

The post To ride or not to ride? appeared first on Cartoon Thunder.

I’m still not sure why these two hang around each other, but it really appeals to me in terms of the irony it presents. This is what was missing more than anything they whole time the story was up in space.

I don’t know if I mentioned this recently, but I think I’ve fallen in love with another motorcycle. As such, after a 25 year relationship with my shovelhead, I’ll be looking to sell it sometime soon to pull together a down payment on a new (or relatively new) Victory.  I sat on one recently at my local dealership, and it was all over. The funny thing is, the Victory Vision reminds me a lot of the bikes the aliens rode in the July Keeping Up With Jones strips.

I’ll keep you updated.

The post The friends we keep… appeared first on Cartoon Thunder.

Most of my big breaks have come in the form of break-downs by the side of the road, including a major oil loss engine seize  a few flat tires, a detached (and fallen) exhaust pipe, a sucked intake o-ring, and a few other ride-stoppers.

There was a guy in a community I once lived in who seemed to enjoy a place as the local nut-job. He wasn’t a major tweaker (anymore?), but at some point in his personal history, he had, as novelist James Lee Burke often puts it, “crossed an imaginary line” that left normal thinking and existence behind. He created no problems, nor did he invite any. But he was comfortable in what seemed to be a self lobotomized existence, and seemed happy, even cared for.

It seemed like a nice career from where I sat at the time. Apparently our hero here thinks the same.

I’ve been largely quiet about it, but the Hollister Motorcycle Rally is back on for 2013. We haven’t really had a rally proper for something like six or seven years. Folks who’ve been working the entire time to bring it back include Mike Corbin, Christy Howe, the Hollister City Council, and countless others. Notable is that Mayor Velasquez has chosen to keep his restaurant, the Vault, closed that weekend to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest. Most think that the event is good for the area.

The event is being coordinated by Mark Cresswell of Worldwide Dynamics. Cresswell has been a respected promoter for a number of years and has experience at Daytona, Laconia, and other events. Word I get is that he’s got the right motives and ideas to make this good for local business without costing the taxpayer the way it has in the past. Cresswell has been in dialog with not only the city council, but local law enforcement to create solutions around enforcement costs, including having the official rally only on Friday and Saturday, July 5 and 6, leaving the 4th and 7th available for folks to ride in anyway. Somehow, any police costs not related to an official rally are budgeted differently in terms of categorical spending.

I don’t expect the thing to be over-policed, or to feature a helicopter festival, my euphemism for the circling surveillance that has characterized the last several rallies here.

I’m working with Don “Thunder” Baggett of Myrtle Beach to develop an event map highlighting local businesses, something Thunder has been doing in his area for 20 years. While I thought about trying to do the art myself, it made more sense to work with Thunder for a ton of reasons.  I do the spot sales, he does the art.  I’ll keep you updated on this.

During the event this year I’ll be at my drawing table set up in the showroom at the Corbin factory in Hollister. They’ve been kind enough to provide some space there for me for the last several years. I hope you’ll stop by and say hi if you show up for the rally.

The post His Big Break appeared first on Cartoon Thunder.

I’m pretty sure I touched on this before, but there’s some fun in the tension between the law and the biker element.

Easy to suggest that there are a ton of different attitudes towards cops among my readership, and I dare say a few cops are among them, including a few friends. Like bikers, you can’t paint ‘em all with the same brush.

Once, in about 1987, I was road-tripping my way through the Sierra Nevada and came to a construction roadblock outside the town of Downieville (or was it Sierra City?) when a local sheriff’s deputy decided to do the lights and siren trick on me to check me out.

Granted, I was a long-haired hippy lookin’ youngster on a Sporster, and he was a hybrid of Rocoe P. Coltrane meets Boss Hogg. It was fate, and we each had a role to play. His gripe was that my pipes were too loud, and he proceeded to  run his nightstick up my exhaust pipes to check for a baffle. Which he found. A California Highway Patrol happened to be on hand also and, as if to temper the yokle cop’s stance, merely suggested that “It’s a Harley–they’re just loud.”

Who knows, maybe he had one at home.

The post Comfortable in opposition appeared first on Cartoon Thunder.

Come the most amazing things. Who knew? Yeah, yeah, only in a comic. Only in Jones.

I’ve gotten some great responses to the reader survey. Only a few readers want to go back to the old strip style comic. I’m not sure if they like the format better of if they believe it will be a return to three strips a week. Oddly, I find the page format easier to work with. Nearly all responses called for a bike in every strip, which makes sense to me. I’ll work on that, and when I fall short there, I’ll have a really great booze punchline.

I’ve been looking to put the shovelhead back on the road lately and am having pretty bad luck. I continue to get some weird intermittent noises from the drivetrain someplace. I’ve never had anything like this before and I’m stumped. I’m thinking it may be the support bearing in the inner primary, but it sounds bigger than that. I’m actually kind of worried about it.

The truth is, it reminds me a little, at least in my memory, of the noise the Tardis makes in Dr. Who. In reality it sounds nothing like that, but at some point it seemed parallel and replaced the original noise. In my head.

This is why I draw this comic–to use my imagination for good, not evil.

The post From the mouths of cops appeared first on Cartoon Thunder.

I haven’t had so many bikes in a comic in quiet some time. Maybe ever. Kind of a good thing, really.

Whatever it takes to get us back to Earth, I say.  I started watching Dr. Who a few months ago, and while I enjoy the show quite a bit, watching it while working on this strip got me flexing my completely wacko imaginative muscles.

To counter balance the influence of sci-fi, I’ve added House of Cards with Kevin Spacey. Seriously dark drama, dark in a sort of Macbeth-type Shakespearean tragedy sort of way. Way to serious to influence this comic.

I still need your feedback! If you haven’t already done so, please respond to the survey I put together. You may not be one of my regular commenters, but your  voice is still very important to me in getting you the biker comic you want here.

The post Back to Earth? appeared first on Cartoon Thunder.

Yup. I was probably guilty of this a few times in my youth. In fact, I’m pretty sure it cost me an accident once.

I spent some time getting ready for a small weekend biker campout near Placerville. Most of the getting ready, unfortunately, was in my mind. That means I was absolutely set on going, safety aside. So when, an hour into my ride, my rear brake went out, and I knew why, and decided it was too much of a pain to fix, I kept riding rather than do anything intelligent.

Stupid.

Nearly at my destination, alone, I grabbed too much front brake in the dark on a wooded road. Wound up with the bike on me, three broken ribs, and a guy named Big Al (who I think passed on a few years ago) pulling the bike off me and saying in Canadian (Canadian English), “You’re gonna be okay, we’ll just get this bike off you.”  I wound up in the hospital until the next day, and had sort of an ordeal getting out since they don’t release you unless someone is there to pick you up. This was before cell phones were too commonplace, and reaching someone from the event to come and get me wasn’t easy.

Live and learn. I’m older now and less likely to ride off into the wind if I’m not sure of my ride. Lucky I made it this far.

The post The wages of laziness appeared first on Cartoon Thunder.

I had more fun with this one than I’ve had with a comic in a while.

The other day I was looking at some of my work from 2011 and got a little nostalgic. About the look of the art, the tension between the law and the outlaw, and the old-school flavor of the story. In this one I managed to bring that back a little without breaking from the current story of being in space. Of course, I could manufacture something to get us back to earth pronto, but there are some unexplored possibilities out here in space. I think the trick is to make sure we break out the bikes pretty often.

If you haven’t already done so, I do have my reader survey still active. I’m honestly looking to the future and would like to find out what drives your interest in the comic.

I’m off work this week (sort of) and have been engaging in more art, which is fun. I have a few things to handle in the classroom before I go back to work, but it’s nice to have some downtime for fun, family, and art. The weather has been pretty unpleasant, but I need to get a new battery for the shovelhead and see how it does with spring coming on, and with the Top Hatters annual Bike Blessing a month away.

The post The advantage of wheels appeared first on Cartoon Thunder.

It varies. For some, it’s throwing a ball, playing catch, working on an engine. For others it’s taking the kid out for his first (legal) drink at 21. For still others, there’s the element of one’s first criminal enterprise, steps toward a felony career. Can Porkins resist?

I may yet color this one, but I worked it out with the intention of good line work. I was developing some pages for a publication using some of the strips from 2011, which I haven’t looked at in a while. Reviewing them again reminded me of some of the things I really like about those strips. The sense of ink and line, of inked shading, and decent gags in the strip.

Hey, do me a favor if you haven’t already. I’ve put together a reader survey, with the reward of a .pdf download at the end. I’d love some input about the direction of this strip. The one question I left out dealt with frequency, simply because I’m sure my regular readers would get all the Jones I could put out. Thanks for that!

The post Father son bonding rites appeared first on Cartoon Thunder.

You never know what will happen the first time someone gets a drink in ‘em. In this case, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?

The post A first time for everything… appeared first on Cartoon Thunder.